Book review: One Man Against The World - Nixon's tragedy

The conventional wisdom among Nixon apologists is that the Watergate scandal has been overblown, that the crimes were ones that had been committed by other presidents, too, and that Richard Nixon was a great man who did great things. And this certainly would be the judgment that Nixon wanted history to have of him.

But as Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Tim Weiner expertly shows in the late president was an aberration, and his deeds nearly destroyed the country. His chief legacy is not the opening of communist China, but a pattern of presidential abuse of power from which the country is still recovering.

Most books about Nixon suffer from a lack of perspective. Because Nixon wire-tapped his own offices and (illegally) those of other people, and his aides took copious notes of conversations, there are reams of documentation of what happened during his administration. Because of this, it is easy to become mired in the details of the Nixon presidency.

Weiner slices through these disparate elements, pulling in only the threads that advance the telling of Nixon's story. This includes some material that was only declassified last year. Weiner also avoids the trap of dwelling on the president's background, noting only how Nixon's personality - the ruthlessness, the ambition, the political instinct and the amorality - was revealed in his formative years.

Once in office, Nixon was determined to win the Vietnam war, or at least to have America leave the war "with peace and honour". To that end, he ordered unprecedented secret bombings of neutral Laos and Cambodia, where the North Vietnamese had bases.